Oct 23, 2017

How to Prolong the Life of a Laptop Hard Drive

Laptop computer owners can be hard on their computers, and their hard drives can bear the brunt of the damage. This causes many laptop drives to fail before their time.

It's impossible to completely prevent a hard drive from failing, but here are a few tips to help you maintain your laptop's hard disk, helping it last longer and run better.

Watch what your laptop's sitting on. One of the biggest causes of hard drive failure is heat--an overheating computer, of course, means an overheating hard drive, so you want to take measures to avoid running your laptop in high-temperature environments.

Laptops dispense heat differently, but usually whatever a laptop's sitting on will become hot, so you want that to be a surface that conducts heat away from a laptop, not just back into it. Keep your laptop off of rugs and out of small, enclosed spaces while it's running.

Turn off your laptop when it's not running. If you can decrease the amount of time that your laptop spends accessing its hard drive, do it--it stands to reason that this will prolong the operating life of the hard drive, since, well, it's operating less when it doesn't need to be. You don't want to cycle the laptop too much, though, so you can keep it on or put it in standby if you're not going to be using it for thirty minutes or so, but you do plan on coming back to it.

Keep your laptop on a surge protector. Laptop users seem to think that the "keep your computer on a surge protector" rule doesn't apply to them for some reason, but every computer owner needs to watch out for electrical surges that could fry their devices or send a slight hiccup to their hard drives, causing a premature failure. If you travel with your laptop, bring a surge protector along. Discover more about laptop safety measures from Bestprogramminglaptop.com.

Perform basic computer maintenance. Likewise, it's important to defrag and run scandisk on your laptop on a regular basis, as this takes some of the pressure off of the read/write heads of your laptop's hard drive, allowing them to find free space without jumping all over the hard drive surface.

This decreased activity leads to increased performance life. Also, remember to include data backup as part of your computer's maintenance--all hard drives will eventually fail, no matter how well you take care of them.

Do you have any other tips for prolonging a laptop hard drive's operating life? Post in comments section below.

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Elizabeth Diane is from Best Programming Laptops. Specializes on best and most suitable laptop for programming. You can visit her site via BestProgrammingLaptop.com.

Don't hibernate your laptop always. Don't let your laptop power off by itself replace the back up if not in good condition. Because too much hibernation and self power off always damage the hard drives

I’m thinking of getting a 16GB SSD Chromebook for remote desktops, and using external HDDs for storage. My 120GB Seagate drive from early 2003 is still fast, despite SpeedFan saying it’s not fit anymore due to a stable 100 bad sectors.

Sorry, I’m talking about flash based storage in general, not SSDs pretending to be HDs. Maybe some brands of SSDs are having reliability issues, but not the ones I’ve seen. OWC is selling enterprise grade SSDs which are very reliable. And Apple has been ahead of the curve for flash adoption for the past several years by incorporating PCIe based flash modules. MacBook Airs aren’t having any reliability problems and the speed gains from them using SSD is easily noticed. And iOS devices are not slowing down after a few years like, for example, Nexus 7 does due to using flash.

I agree with everything you say. However, even with so-called “primitive” operating systems, SSDs are faster than HDs and the end user doesn’t care about over-provisioning. As long as they can save their data, they’re happy. And well, we’ve had SSDs in real world usage long enough to know it’s reliable enough to replace an HD in all but the most demanding uses. So why wouldn’t you use an SSD in this case? Or use both? Use HD for large files and SSD for your OS and Apps to enjoy the speed increase.

You may be happy to know that with modern filesystems like btrfs the choice will be much easier. For example, you have a 4Tb drive, you can simply pop in another SSD, tell the fs it’s an SSD. And the fs will automatically store “hot” files on that device giving you the benefits of both types of devices.

Maybe it was luck who knows, but my very first SSD fails in a month, that doesn’t give me much confidence the next one won’t do the same thing, and it’s way too much trouble having to re-install all the OS, 3rd party software, settings, tweeks and all the rest you have to do on a new drive to mess around with flaky drives.

I have a full Cooler Master tower case for my PC. All I have to do is take off two side panels, disconnect two wires (SATA and power), slide the SSD out because it’s in one of the slide-in drive trays, replace the SSD, slide it back in, reconnect the cables, and replace the side panels. All done in less than four minutes.

For me, my SSD produced a dramatic increase in performance. Programs start faster, the boot up takes far less time, etc. I have an SSD in my notebook and desktop, the notebook however saw the biggest improvement in speed but then again most notebook HDDs scrape the bottom of the barrel when it comes to performance numbers.

You may have a bad drive if you didn’t notice a significant difference in load times. Boot times should drop significantly as well. Standard HDD boot times were upwards of 3 minutes where my SSD will fully boot in 20 seconds. I’m struggling with your understanding of computer components…there are millions of drives out there…a few hundred people with issues certainly doesn’t justify a crisis. Seems foolish not getting a replacement because you read something on a forum somewhere…

Never had a problem with my Samsung 840 Series SSD. I’ve had it for about eight months now and it’s been very stable, no signs of any issues. I fully expect it to still be working three years from now.

Windows 8 has changed the way its defrag program works. If it detects an ssd, it wont defrag it in the classical sense, but it will send hints to trim to optimize the ssd. So its probably worth keeping windows defrag enabled. Im not sure of any third party defraggers that have this option yet.